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Hollie Adams
A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

Michael Hayward
Conversations with the past

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Maryanna Gabriel
More Than one way to hang a man

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Peggy Thompson
Rollicking and honest: LIKE Me

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Helen Godolphin
Pinball wizardry

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Kathy Page
The Exquisite Cyclops

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

Meandricus
Wordy goodness

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Michael Hayward
Circled By Wolves

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Cornelia Mars
On MOtherhood: Transforming Perceptions

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
WEST COAST FORAGING

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Adrian Rain
Schrödinger’s Kids

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

Kendra Heinz
Big Dread at West Ed

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Anson Ching
A history of outport rivalry

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Emily Lu
Love Song for Mosquito

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

Anson Ching
Fables Galore

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Peggy Thompson
Beautiful and subversive books

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

Michael Hayward
A play is a play is a play

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

JEROME STUEART
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Kris Rothstein
Intelligence Girls

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Dayna Mahannah
The Academy of Profound Oddities

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

Patty Osborne
From Russia With Love

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Helen Godolphin
ON Piracy (And petrified oranges)

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Joseph Pearson
No Names

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

JILL MANDRAKE
ONCE A PUNK BAND, ALWAYS A CULTURE BEARER

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Robert Everett-Green
Wholesome Reading

Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.

Barbara Zatyko
Stumped

Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.

Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet: Short Film

A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.

David Koulack
A Different Sort of Synagogue

David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.

Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Shelley Kozlowski
Revving

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

Thad McIlroy
Check-Out

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

Michał Kozłowski
In the Flesh

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

Evel Economakis
Leningrad Redact

“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Christine Novosel
Stuck on the Grid

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Stephen Osborne
The Orwell Effect

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

Sheila Heti
Law of Small Numbers

Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

Margaret Nowaczyk
Ad Infinitum

"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."

Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

Jane Silcott
Ducks

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic

People are getting either sick or mad, or both.

Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining

The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.

M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy

"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."

Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN

"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes

Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Media Studies

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

CONNIE KUHNS
Fifty Years in Review

A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.

J. Jill Robinson
Hot Pulse

I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.

Stephen Osborne
The Great Game

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.

CONNIE KUHNS
Last Day in Cheyenne

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

CONNIE KUHNS
Strange Women

Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.

M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds

We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.

D.M. FRASER
Surrounded by Ducks

D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.

DAVID COLLIER
The Last Grain Elevator in Regina

When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor.

Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail

What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Eve Corbel
Getting It Wrong

It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.

HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves

When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.

Stephen Smith
Rinkside Intellectual

Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.

Brad Cran
Fact
Leading Men

"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.

Brad Cran
Fact
Empires of Film
Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois

Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.

Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur

Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.

Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl

Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.

Daniel Francis
War of Independence

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik

Hal Niedzviecki com­mem­o­rates his Jewish grand­fa­ther—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.

Stephen Osborne
Straight Razor and Other Poems

Salvatore Ala has written a poem about a barbershop that may have no equal in that genre. It can be found in his new book, Straight Razor and Other Poems (Biblioasis).

Eve Corbel
StatsCan Publications

During Geist's first year, we devoted many inches of this column to thoughts on browsing through Canadian book publishers' catalogues. It's as good a way as any to explore the temper of the times, to say nothing of the place. Now I've got two more te

Patty Osborne
Something Drastic

Something Drastic by Colleen Curran (Goose Lane) found its way to the cabin because I was tired of reading serious books. This is not a new book (it came out in 1995) so I must have missed it the first time around, but it is funny and refreshing.

Luanne Armstrong
Sputnik Diner

Sputnik Diner by Rick Maddocks (Knopf) is an in-depth exploration of a group of people who move through a small-town diner in the tobacco belt of southern Ontario. Maddocks shows just enough of his characters’ lives for us to understand, identify and

Mandelbrot
Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lecarbot's Theatre of Nepturne in New France

Jerry Wasserman has assembled the original text and two translations in Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France (Talon Books), a useful and amusing book filled with fascinating little-known facts. The colony at Port Roy

Geist Staff
Spycatcher

Copies of Spycatcher by Peter Wright (General Publishing) are washing up in great numbers these days in the secondhand bookstores, and so may be had for a song. This book, the memoir of a British spy, is an unsettling testament to the power of fictio

Patty Osborne
Spadework

When Rob and Sheila went away for the weekend, Rob was reading, but not enjoying, Spadework by Timothy Findley (HarperFlamingo). This was Rob’s first foray into Findley and he moaned and groaned about the silly plot filled with actor-worship, and the

Trevor Wilson
Socket

Three-day novels tend to get off the ground quickly and move along at a good pace but then, understandably, founder near the end. Socket by David Zimmerman (Anvil), this year’s winner, is an exception: the story never lets up. The novel follows Ronal

Kris Rothstein
Some Girls Do

Clumsy slang and fake angst are what Some Girls Do (do what?) by Teresa McWhirter (Polestar) is all about. While I enjoyed the buoyant conversational style and unconventional characters, I hated McWhirter’s self-conscious portrayal of the subculture

Geist Staff
Songs of Aging Children

Songs of Aging Children, by Ken Klonsky (Arsenal Pulp Press) is a remarkable book of stories about troubled teenagers—people who too rarely find their way onto the centre stage of contemporary fiction. These are very good stories, well imagined and v

Patty Osborne
Soucouyant

In Soucouyant by David Chariandy (Arsenal Pulp Press), a young man whose mother suffers from early-onset dementia pieces together what really happened back home in the Caribbean when she encountered a soucouyant, or evil spirit.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Sointula

I like fiction when it gives me new ideas and I have to put the book down and pick up a dictionary or run something through Google—or when details I had never noticed before suddenly seem obvious. Sointula by Bill Gaston (Raincoast Books) is about a

Mandelbrot
Solitaire

The Canadian version of Waiting for Godot takes place on Christmas Eve in a tavern somewhere in north Ontario, in a movie called Solitaire. In this one the two guys are played by the barkeep and the patrons, who indulge themselves in not enough drink

Stephen Osborne
Snow Man

Snow Man, the masterful new novel by David Albahari (Douglas & McIntyre), belongs precisely to such a narrative of the world; and its provenance is evident from the first sentence, which takes us up in a moment and sweeps us into the history of langu

Norbert Ruebsaat
Slow Man

The ending of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (Secker & Warburg) is disappointing only because the rest of the novel is so good. The main character, Paul Rayment, suffers a crippling bike accident, becomes infatuated with his care nurse and declares his lov

Patty Osborne
Slow Lightning

In Slow Lightning by Mark Frutkin (Raincoast) we meet Sandro Cénovas, a student who is caught in the middle when civil war erupts in Spain. Threatened with arrest or conscription, Sandro flees Barcelona on a borrowed bicycle and heads for the coastal

Stephen Osborne
Small Apartments

The Winner of the 23rd International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest (a venerable institution) is Small Apartments (Anvil Press), written and pleasantly illustrated by Chris Millis, who lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and has worked as a “sportswrit

Kris Rothstein
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

In Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (Penguin), Koren Zailckas recounts her history of alcohol abuse and the years she lost. She took her first drink at age fourteen and she soon craved liquor and needed it for any kind of social interaction.

Stephen Osborne
Smilla's Sense of Snow

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

Michael Hayward
Small Dose of the Infinite

"A mild, or homeopathic, dose of the infinite is the crucial element in the aesthetic experience known as the sublime." A review of The Shell of the Tortoise.

Patty Osborne
Slow Dance

Slow Dance (Knopf) by Bonnie Sherr Klein also kept me from sleeping, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. When I saw Klein’s photo on the cover I realized I’d seen her around at literary events and I was interested in this tall, self-confident woma

Carra Noelle Simpson
Skids

Cathleen With’s book of short stories, Skids (Arsenal Pulp Press), takes a closer look at the human beings who inhabit this community and other communities like it.

Helen Godolphin
Sisters of Grass

If you haven't read a book with a horse sex scene before, Theresa Kishkan's Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane) is one place to start. The story reconstructs the life of Margaret Stuart, a young woman living in the Nicola Valley of B.C. at the turn of the

Geist Staff
Signs of the Times

Must the deconstructionists have every last word?—not any more: Signs of the Times by David Lehman (Poseidon) is out in paperback and worth even penny. Here at last, a work that makes sense of the gobbledygook (by identifying it as gobbledygook), the

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Hollie Adams
A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

Michael Hayward
Conversations with the past

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Maryanna Gabriel
More Than one way to hang a man

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Peggy Thompson
Rollicking and honest: LIKE Me

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Helen Godolphin
Pinball wizardry

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Kathy Page
The Exquisite Cyclops

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

Meandricus
Wordy goodness

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Michael Hayward
Circled By Wolves

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Cornelia Mars
On MOtherhood: Transforming Perceptions

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
WEST COAST FORAGING

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Adrian Rain
Schrödinger’s Kids

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

Kendra Heinz
Big Dread at West Ed

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Anson Ching
A history of outport rivalry

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Emily Lu
Love Song for Mosquito

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

Anson Ching
Fables Galore

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Peggy Thompson
Beautiful and subversive books

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

Michael Hayward
A play is a play is a play

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

JEROME STUEART
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Kris Rothstein
Intelligence Girls

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Dayna Mahannah
The Academy of Profound Oddities

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

Patty Osborne
From Russia With Love

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Helen Godolphin
ON Piracy (And petrified oranges)

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Joseph Pearson
No Names

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

JILL MANDRAKE
ONCE A PUNK BAND, ALWAYS A CULTURE BEARER

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Kelly Bouchard
After the Flames

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act